Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Andre LaMothe's creations have a neo-retro bent that's hard to resist. Combining the sensibilities of game systems from 20 years ago with the DIY appeal of a microcontroller board. LaMothe's XGameStation Micro - a compact video game hardware kit - gave hobbyists the opportunity to write games that are closer to the bare metal than most programmers have been in decades.

The XGameStation Pico Edition 2.0 (makezine.com/xgamestation) takes you even closer. Modern game programming environments use collections of code libraries and high-level design tools to hide the complexity of the hardware from programmers. The Pico lets you duplicate the experience of writing games for a retro system like the Atari 2600: hardware and software fuse into a single platform, and in pushing the limits of that platform, you challenge yourself to come up with creative hacks that you would never need on today's ultra-powerful systems. Want to draw something on the screen? You'll have to understand something about video signaling first....